Dances With Whales

By ALAN RIDING

Published: April 22, 2002

Correction Appended

VENICE—
Until now Gregory Colbert has been that rare artist who goes out of his way not to be noticed. He was represented by no gallery, he held no exhibitions for a decade, and he gave no interviews. He was in a sense a secret artist, though the secret was shared by a small group of wealthy private collectors who, through acquisitions and sheer enthusiasm, helped to finance his work.

He needed this help. In his quest to photograph the mystical relationship between humans and animals, he made 27 lengthy trips to distant corners of the world over nine years. He was usually accompanied by a support team, supplies and equipment. He even rented oceangoing vessels for months on end. In brief, it was both costly and complicated to produce images of great simplicity.

Now, in the vast and sober space of the Arsenale, the Renaissance-era shipyard owned by the Venice Biennale, Mr. Colbert, 42, is for the first time exhibiting the fruits of these voyages. And as he might have hoped, the result is a discovery not only of this Canadian artist but also of an ageless realm in which elephants and whales as well as manatees, royal eagles, sacred ibis, cranes and falcons cohabit and communicate with humans. Comprising 200 images and a 58-minute documentary, the show, ''Ashes and Snow,'' runs here through July 6.

The earth-tone photographs are printed on Japanese handmade paper, yet the power of the images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood. They are accompanied by no captions, because it matters little how or when or where the photographs were taken. They are simply windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time.

Of course they are also the work of an artist. In other words, they are not nature photographs but careful compositions in which humans and animals are juxtaposed in unexpected ways. Yet even when Mr. Colbert is seen swimming -- he prefers to call it dancing -- with whales, the humans and the animals seem to enjoy equality. ''I have invented nothing,'' he said. ''I have simply documented a magical alchemy that I want to share.''

A different kind of alchemy is at work in the Arsenale, which for the first time has devoted its entire 140,000-square-foot exhibition area to a single artist. By hanging his 40-by-118-inch photographs in relative isolation on either side of a 900-foot-long gallery, Mr. Colbert has given his elephants and whales space to roam freely through the imagination. They then come alive on the screen at the end of the gallery.

Yet for all the contemplative mood of the images, Mr. Colbert does not come across as a New Age dreamer. An athletic-looking man with a pony tail, he has down-to-earth views and a self-deprecating sense of humor. He may be in awe of nature, for instance, yet he mocks what he regards as the naïveté of militant ecologists. He likes to say that he embarked on this adventure in response to the call of elephants, but even that call came to him fortuitously.

''As a kid I was always called an elephant because my ears stuck out,'' he said, laughing. ''My mother was worried that I'd be traumatized, and she had my ears fixed. So I have an association with elephants that goes way back. The elephant became my Proust's madeleine.''

Still, it took him time to reconnect to the elephant. Graduating from high school in Bradford, Ontario, with average grades, he drifted through various uninspiring jobs until, at 21, he decided to become a writer.

''I liked reading,'' he recalled. ''I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own.'' His plan was to head to some remote island of the South Pacific, but he got no farther than Paris.

It proved a good place to be in the 1980's because a new socialist government was heavily subsidising French culture with an eye to neutralizing American influence. After trying his hand at writing, Mr. Colbert joined a group of foreign artists who were being prepared to carry French culture back to their own countries. ''The Catch-22 was that Paris was a great place to live,'' Mr. Colbert said, ''and only 2 of the 30 returned home.''

Through this group Mr. Colbert began making documentary films: one on rape, another on artists confronting death, yet another, ''On the Brink,'' about AIDS, that was shown in the mid-1980's by the Discovery Channel. The AIDS film influenced how he would later work. Because the insurance company sponsoring the program objected to an image of two men kissing, he said, he vowed never again to accept corporate sponsorship.

He also became a photographer, already experimenting with printing on Japanese paper, and in 1991 he held his first show, ''Timewaves,'' at the Museé de l'Élysée, a photography museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. He later destroyed most of the work from the show, but he was nonetheless noticed by a few collectors. What would then become his private sponsorship network was born.

Even now Mr. Colbert is reluctant to discuss his work in detail, laughing off questions with responses like ''Ask the elephants.'' Eventually, though, he explained that ''Ashes and Snow'' began with the idea of a man who had disappeared without a trace writing 365 letters to his wife. The texts exist and served as a point of departure for the work, he added, but they remain unpublished. The only text in the show is a fairy tale about elephants printed on a wall at the entrance to the Arsenale.

Correction: April 30, 2002, Tuesday An article on April 22 about the artist Gregory Colbert, a Canadian whose photographs of the relationship between humanity and animals are on exhibition in Venice, misstated his birthplace. It was Brantford, Ontario, not Bradford.